Energy-Friendly Network Selection in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Mobile terminals in heterogeneous wireless networks continuously undergo network selection within the initial access process and handover process. In order for a mobile terminal to be connected to a network in the best possible way in terms of QoS performance and energy consumption, this paper presents a novel method that takes into account user preferences, network conditions, QoS and energy consumption requirements in order to select the optimal network which achieves the best balance between performance and energy consumption. The proposed network selection method incorporates the use of fuzzy logic because of the available sources of information from different radio access technology (RAT) are qualitatively interpreted and heterogeneous in nature, and adopts different energy consumption metrics for real-time and non-real-time applications. Finally, simulations confirm our scheme's suitability and effectiveness.